LA RONDE

Simone Signoret, Anton Walbrook, and Simone Simon lead a roundelay of French stars in Max Ophüls's delightful, acerbic adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's controversial turn-of-the-century play. Set in the Vienna of the waltz, this exquisite and witty film describes love’s ceaseless roundabout, starting with a sex worker, who loves a soldier, who leaves her for a chambermaid, who . . . etc., etc., until the story comes back to the sex worker in this merry-go-round of love and infidelity. Here the normal narrow view of movie stories, always going forward towards destiny and resolution, is abandoned in favor of the more mocking designs of hazard, obliqueness, and digression, a dance in which the dancers do not hear the beat but in which they revert helplessly to where they began, older and no wiser.

"LA RONDE is a supremely graceful piece of work, impeccably staged by Ophüls and shot with almost preternatural fluency, but it is at its core a celebration of the peculiar, elusive art of acting." - Terrence Rafferty